“Emergency Eyewash ABC” will bring Carol Szymanski, an artist; Barry Schwabsky, a poet and art critic, and Wadada Leo Smith, a musician, to Guild Hall on Saturday at 7 p.m. for a live performance blending poetry, visual art, and music.
The event features a series of live readings from a new alphabet book for adults written by 28 contemporary poets, as well as projections of Szymanski’s video fantasia on the alphabet and musical improvisation by Smith, a trumpeter and composer.
Szymanski’s language-based art spans many mediums, from sculpture and photography to video and performance, often including musical elements with poetic texts. She has become known for a series of sculptures in the form of invented musical instruments, particularly brass horns, using her own alphabetic font. Smith will respond in real time, on Szymanski’s sculptural horns, to the spoken word and projected imagery.
Schwabsky has published six books of poems, including “The Bone China Years” (Black Square Editions, 2026); “Water From Another Source” (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), and “Feelings of And” (Black Square Editions, 2022). He has been a visiting artist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and is an art critic for The Nation, an editor at Artforum, and a contributor to many books and catalogues on modern and contemporary art.
Smith has researched a variety of music cultures, including African, Japanese, Indonesian, European, and American. He was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music for “Ten Freedom Summers,” a collection of compositions created over the course of 34 years and inspired by the civil rights movement. It was released in 2012 as a four-CD boxed set. In 2022 he was selected as a Mellon Arts and Practitioners Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.
As for Emergency Eyewash, it is a conceptual brand, or umbrella, for collaborative projects by Szymanski and Schwabsky with many others in the fields of art, writing, design, and sound, according to Szymanski’s website. “ABC” refers to the 28 American poets of different generations invited to write poems responding to letters of the alphabet. The number reflects that early American ABC books often included an ampersand and a period after Z, the idea being that the alphabet constitutes a complete thought, or a sort of sentence.
Tickets are $18.
A performance by the comedian Robby Hoffman, set for Sunday at 7 p.m., is sold out.
